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Mark Brady. Photo.

Mark Brady

Policy officer

Mark Brady. Photo.

An agent-based approach to modeling impacts of agricultural policy on land use, biodiversity and ecosystem services

Author

  • Mark Brady
  • Christoph Sahrbacher
  • Konrad Kellermann
  • Kathrin Happe

Summary, in English

We present extensions to the agent-based agricultural policy simulator (AgriPoliS) model that make it possible to simulate the consequences of agricultural policy reform on farmers' land use decisions and concomitant impacts on landscape mosaic, biodiversity and ecosystem services in a real agricultural region. An observed population of farms is modelled as a multi-agent system where individual farm-agent behaviour and their interactions-principally competition for land-are defined through an optimization framework with land use and landscape impacts resulting as emergent properties of the system. The model is calibrated to real data on the farms and the landscape to be studied. We illustrate the utility of the model by evaluating the potential impacts of three alternative frameworks for the European Union Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on landscape values in two marginal agricultural regions. Mosaic value was found to be sensitive to the choice of policy scheme in one of the landscapes, whereas significant trade-offs were shown to occur in terms of species richness by habitat and species composition at the landscape scale in both regions. The relationship between food production and other ecosystem services was found to be multifaceted. Thus illustrating the difficulty of achieving landscape goals in a particular region with simple or general land management rules (such as the current rules attached to CAPs direct payments). Given the scarcity of funding for conservation, the level and conditions for allocating direct payments are, potentially, of great importance for preserving landscape values in marginal agricultural regions (subject to levels of other support).

Department/s

  • Centre for Environmental and Climate Science (CEC)
  • BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate

Publishing year

2012

Language

English

Pages

1363-1381

Publication/Series

Landscape Ecology

Volume

27

Issue

9

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Springer

Topic

  • Earth and Related Environmental Sciences

Keywords

  • Agent-based modeling (ABM)
  • Landscape
  • Policy
  • CAP
  • Agriculture
  • Farming
  • Biodiversity

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1572-9761